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Sunday reviews

Written on: May 17th, 2009 by: in Reviews

Here are some selections from today’s New York Times book reviews, with links to the Delaware Library Catalog record so you can check availability, place holds, etc.:
Today’s reviews included a really strong review for Horse soldiers, by Doug Stanton. This is for readers who prefer red-blooded military history with a Chesty Puller, “Nuts!” flavor, although while this is a story about heroes, and far from being an analytical work, the book doesn’t avoid talking about higher-level strategy and policy failure in the Afghanistan conflict. You can read the full review here.

Not being a nautical type, I did not know that there even was a difference between flotsam and jetsam! Flotsametrics, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer summarizes four decades of the author’s research into understanding global ocean currents by tracing human garbage on the high seas.

America may have elected its first black President last year, but in 2005 an African glass ceiling was shattered with the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as president of Liberia, and as Africa’s first female president. Her biography, This Child will be Great was recently published to no little acclaim. Liberia is a traditionally very patriarchal society, still recovering from a very recent and monstrously destructive civil and regional war. That Sirleaf survived is itself remarkable- she was a member of the LIberian government during two separate coups led by two different murderous lunatics- but to live through that experience and commit to rebuilding her shattered and still precarious society is awe-inspiring.

The 20th anniversary of the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre will be observed in a couple of weeks, and while we won’t be seeing “Prisoner of the State”, former Chinese premiere Zhao Ziyang’s account of the democracy protests in American for a while (they’ve not been translated yet), the discussion surrounding this book reminds me of the reason why freedom to read and to access information is vital to society- this book, by itself, may create a whole new understanding of a critical event in modern history and have a dramatic effect in China itself.